What Car Did Harry Lyon Drive? – The Answer to Tuesday’s Search Challenge

Do a fast Google search for “southern cross airplane” and the leading result will be a Wikipedia page about the aircraft. Its essential to consist of “aircraft” in the search since browsing Google for simply “southern cross” will put a music video of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song Southern Cross at the top of the results. Even more down the search results page for “southern cross” youll discover links to posts about the constellation of the same name, links to an energy company, and links to a Brazilian award for chivalry.

Step 3: Find the referral to Paris Hill. If you follow the link to the Maine Memory Network from the Wikipedia page about Harry Lyon, youll find a fairly long short article about Lyon and his life consisting of that his moms and dads purchased a house on Paris Hill and Lyon later on lived there.

You might have followed the hint about utilizing the Maine Memory Networks website then headed there to do a search within the website for references to Harry Lyon.

Action 2: Identify who flew on the aircraft.
Also on that exact same Wikipedia page youll learn that the 4 members of the flight crew were Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, Harry Lyon, and James Warner.

Based on the lists of American vehicle producers and what we know about Lyon, Ford is the most common guess as it was the most popular brand name in the United States at the time and is still in the leading edge of Americans minds today when they think of car producers. Now its a matter of comparing pictures of automobiles produced by those manufacturers throughout the 1910s and early 1920s.

Now that weve considered the points above we can start guessing at the maker of the vehicle and the production year. Noting that vehicles didnt substantially alter from one model year to the next at this time, if they did at all, were guessing the year according to decade or half-decade is a practical method to this challenge. A search for “1920s cars and trucks” or “1910s vehicles” is a starting location.

On Tuesday I shared
If you wanted the answers to the concerns in the challenge, a search obstacle and composed that you could email me. I got
The other day early morning I invested time composing out the process of finding the answers to Tuesdays search challenge. If you missed out on the difficulty, you can
find it here. The solution is detailed below..

By zooming in on the image you can look at some crucial information consisting of the shape of the front door on the automobile, the shape of the front of the car, and a little badge on the front of the car.

Step 4: Find the reference to a car. At the very bottom of this Maine Memory Network page about Harry Lyon youll see an image of Lyon being in an automobile in his driveway in 1927. (The image is copyrighted so youll have to view it there)..

As mentioned above, the top Google search results page for “southern cross plane” is the Wikipedia page about the airplane. Go through that page and youll find out that it was the very first aircraft to be flown from the United States to Australia.

Use Google Images to discover images of Ford, Studebaker, and Dodge cars and trucks produced in those years. Compare the images carefully to those of the image of Lyon sitting in his cars and truck and youll start to notice that the shape of the door in his automobile doesnt match those of Ford and Studebaker (theyre not as rounded at the bottom). In all 3 cases, the Dodge examples are constant with what we see in the picture of Lyon in his vehicle.

At this point the process ends up being a bit of uncertainty followed by a process of comparison and elimination. There are some indicate think about before rating what type of cars and truck remains in the photo. Heres a list of those indicate consider:.
First, the image was taken in 1927, a year prior to the flight of the Southern Cross.
From checking out him, we understand that Lyon was not a male of remarkable wealth, but probably middle to upper-middle class.
Based upon Lyons monetary standing along with taking a look at the information of the vehicle we can most likely remove luxury brands from our uncertainty.
When we zoom-in on the vehicle we can see that it has some imperfections as the result of driving and or post-manufacturing modification. Significant, there are what seems 2 wood bench seats behind the drivers seat. The back half of the body appears to be wood.

To do this youll want to enlarge the photo discovered on the Maine Memory Networks post about Lyon. By zooming in on the image you can look at some essential details including the shape of the front door on the automobile, the shape of the front of the automobile, and a little badge on the front of the vehicle.

There are a couple of methods to reach the responses. What Ive described listed below is the most direct method to get to the responses. (Thanks again to Daniel Russells.
Delight of Search for motivating the development of search difficulties like this one).

Once youve recognized who the members of the flight crew were, the next step is to find out which one had a connection to Maine. To do this, open the Wikipedia page for each member of the flight crew then use keyboard commands of CTRL+F (Windows computers) or COMMAND+F (Mac computers) to browse each page for the word “Maine.” Just the pages for Charles Kingsford Smith and Harry Lyon include a match for “Maine” and the match on Smiths page is only found in the context of the word “remained.” Lyons page includes “Maine” as part of a link to the Maine Memory Networks website which is mentioned in the hints for this difficulty.

Disclosure: I spent at least ten hours comparing images of cars and trucks to the one of Lyon being in his automobile. To confirm my info about the car I enlisted the help of one the leading antique car preservationists in the country, Jeff Orwig. Jeff is a friend of mine and the curator of Bob Bahres elegant vehicle collection housed on Paris Hill in Paris, Maine. You can read more about the collection here..

A search for “1920s vehicles” or “1910s cars and trucks” is a starting place. Compare the photos closely to those of the picture of Lyon sitting in his cars and truck and youll start to observe that the shape of the door in his car does not match those of Ford and Studebaker (theyre not as rounded at the bottom). Disclosure: I invested at least ten hours comparing images of cars and trucks to the one of Lyon sitting in his vehicle. To validate my info about the vehicle I got the assistance of one the leading antique cars and truck preservationists in the country, Jeff Orwig.

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